Sunday, December 6, 2015

Increments as the Instruments of the Insolent

The word "mining" in the military sense derives from the ore-extraction sense of "mining." When a medieval army besieged a strong castle, one useful method of attack was to dig a tunnel, just like a mine shaft in the sense we would think of, extending under the castle's outer wall. When this tunnel was made to collapse, the stone structure directly above it could not help also collapsing. (It was only much later that the noun "mine" began to mean a distinct physical object that was essentially a type of bomb.) But of course, this ancient UNDER-mining took time, all the more so because the besiegers would rather that their own men avoided being killed by a premature cave-in. So success required patience. As in medieval warfare, so in the modern war of ideas.                                  
                                                                                                           
                                                                                                                                                                In all of its major strategies, that which is generally known as "the left" operates by increments. And no, I'm not saying that literally everything leftist on Earth has one seamless, unified human command structure issuing orders to every totalitarian liar everywhere. But for people who desire to see an all-controlling monopoly government ruling everyone and everything, without reference or reverence to the Creator of everyone and everything, it comes naturally to be gradual and methodical about destroying basic elements of civilization.                                                                                                                
                                                                                                                                                             G.K. Chesterton wrote that only those for whom the home is sacred have moral ground from which to defy the state. Loyalty to a family competes with loyalty to a government. Sometimes the family is in the wrong, but sometimes not; and worshipers of centralized government want to remove the very possibility that anyone might ever say, "Wait! I can't obey this command, because it would cause needless and undeserved harm to the people I love!" Jesus warned that we must not love father or mother more than we love Him; but collectivist tyrants don't want us loving a distinct, self-directed family AT ALL. Which is why the Soviet Union and other dictatorships have encouraged the peasants to inform on their own relatives, as well as on their neighbors, for actual or imagined rebellion.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

    Therefore, the creation of Soviet-style regimes calls for the value of a family to be eroded in people's minds. But like the undermining of a castle, this can't be achieved all in one stroke. So it is that in the West, the brainless admirers of Communism, as directed by their soulless opinion-makers, have eroded the family without admitting that they were doing so.... by gradually introducing the notion that ALL associations between people equally are families. And in the words of the animated character Syndrome, when everyone is super, no one will be.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

The process was built into the very start of secularizing society. If there is no God to define things, well, then the progressive geniuses must "reluctantly" shoulder the noble task of defining human relationships, no applause necessary. Human desire and sentiment became the whole reason for marriage. This first pill went down fairly easily, since of course romantic love is not bad in itself; but the Rousseaus and the Marxes wanted love to be without any transcendent rule to guide it. From love being the cause of marriage, they went on to argue that love made marriage unnecessary. A nice, easy step, still remaining heterosexual. Marriage was an artificial construct, while the reproductive urge was natural, so of course let's prefer the natural -- and get busy fornicating. Everybody else is, aren't they? Already in this early phase, anyone objecting to promiscuity could be vilified as "intolerant" and "hateful."                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
                                                   
I am not hateful, esteemed reader. I know my own failings, and so am obligated to make allowances for other people's failings. But contrary to leftwing dogma, having compassion on human weakness does not mean that we should throw away the model which God provided for us to strive toward.


                                                                                       
 Heterosexual promiscuity was dishonestly touted to women as liberating them in particular, because they could assume the initiative instead of just hoping a man would call. But in actual practice, the sexual revolution liberated the selfishness of those males who had rejected God's standards. They wanted to play and not pay --wanted to drink the milk without buying and feeding the cow. Millions of women found themselves used and discarded; so it was necessary for the left to make an adjustment, before moving on to the gay-marriage phase. Women were encouraged to be justifiably angry at men who used them selfishly. Only, this anger must not lead to the restoration of the value of marriage; instead, it must lead to contempt for men as men. Hence the increase in television comedy shows whose male characters were useless morons who couldn't find their noses with both hands in daylight unless a woman helped them.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
                                                                                                                                                             Here, a divide occurred. The left was never going to persuade all men to accept being seen as feeble clowns; thus, they must be allowed to enjoy James Bond movies and other entertainments, where males could still be strong, smart and successful. But these heroes no longer were looking for marriage. So in one lane of the broad highway we saw men who weren't losers, but who weren't ideal-father material either; and in the other lane we saw men who would still get married, but who had almost nothing to offer to their goddess-like superior wives. What the leftwing culture didn't want us to see was men who did things God's way, combining strength with tenderness as Jesus would do.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                


This much damage done cleared the way for the "normalization" of homosexuality and then same-sex marriage. Fortunately for the purposes of the left, most Westerners were paying no attention to history, or else they would have noticed the pop culture doing a one-eighty. Back in the Sixties, we had been specifically told that we must forget an artificial construct in favor of what was natural. But in order to set up homosexuals as the new victim-group aristocrats who could do no wrong, it was necessary for pop culture to forget what was natural, in favor of an artificial construct.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
                                 
The transgender delusion, coming after all that went before, is like a mopping-up campaign, crushing the last pockets of resistance. Even with homosexuality being praised as the ultimate in love and beauty, at least people still agreed that there were such things as men and women; but now, the transgender movement insists that there aren't even any definitions -- only self-absorbed blank-tablet human spirits, who are whatever they say they are. All the previous phases of cultural sabotage entailed changing values and rules; but the transgender fantasy, an integral feature of post-modernism, is calculated to collapse the very structure of thought itself, so NO ONE CAN any longer discuss coherently what might have gone wrong and what should be done to remedy it.                    


                                                                                                                 
When a population is deprived both of saving faith in Jesus Christ, and of the ability to think logically, it is even more defenseless against enslavement than a population deprived of weapons for physical self-defense. And that is where we have now arrived.